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Title details for A Writer's Life by Gay Talese - Available

A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese
Arthur Morey
Audiobook
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The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons). How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor’s were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man’s life, and of writing itself.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 25, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415953525
      • File size: 600009 KB
      • Duration: 20:50:01

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author Gay Talese rambles through his impressions of World Cup soccer, immigrants from Italy, a doomed restaurant building in New York, and back to soccer, with detours through the Lorena Bobbitt case and spot-on criticisms of his high school English teacher. Arthur Morey takes great care in navigating Talese's wandering and complex sentence structure, making the best of endless constructions that would benefit from a liberal dose of periods. Morey treats the work with a journalistic sense of detachment, appropriate for an author who writes for the NEW YORK TIMES. His unhurried approach supports the listener's efforts to keep track of the interesting stories buried under the plethora of words. R.L.L. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 6, 2006
      According to Talese, "Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch." Reading his first substantially new publication since 1992's Unto the Sons
      is like being in the passenger seat of that truck while it's in motion. Talese begins with a World Cup women's match between China and the United States; the game gives him a story idea, which he then abandons for roughly 300 pages for elegant digressions on, among other things, the civil rights demonstrations in Selma, the Lorena Bobbitt controversy and a string of flopped restaurants in an Upper East Side building. Somehow, he also works in a memoir of his early life, including perfectly etched memories of the New York Times
      newsroom (without directly reflecting on his prominence as one of the first New Journalists). This sort of thing can drag for long stretches unless you're willing to simply follow along as Talese pursues his impulses wherever they lead him. No matter how frustrating it is as memoir, though, this is a near-perfect expression of Talese's inquisitive personality, an inquisitiveness that has led to some of the outstanding journalism of the past few decades. 150,000 first printing.

    • Library Journal

      March 1, 2007
      Despite the title, this is not an autobiography, nor does it reveal much about writing. For the most part, "A Writer's Life" is merely an opportunity for a famous nonfiction writer to cobble together uncompleted manuscripts about such subjects as a Chinese soccer star, the John Wayne Bobbit and Lorena Bobbit case, and the changing racial climate in Selma, AL. While these topics, especially Selma, are fascinating to varying degrees, Talese's method of jumping from one to another and back again indicates his book's lack of a clear focus. The author can be quite compelling when writing about something having a more personal connection, as with the tribulations of New York restaurants. The tidbits of autobiography are also interesting, like his surprise (to him) wedding in Rome in 1959. Talese also excels when describing the moral hypocrisy at the "New York Times" in the 1950s. But too much of this book resembles a long-out-of-date collection of magazine pieces. Despite referring to one or both Bobbits as Babbit, Arthur Morey reads capably but not well enough. Not recommended.Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr.

      Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Talese recounts bits--usually unconnected or episodic--of his life and work habits in complex, wandering sentences, laden with subordinate clauses and long words; read in a tone relatively lacking in variation, they give the impression of tedious garrulity. He drones on, Grandpa-Simpson-like, about trivialities, tiresomely sure of his own self-importance, in love with the sound of his own voice. Moreover, he swallows words and pronounces them lazily and sloppily--the "nineteen" of dates, for instance, becoming "nineen" or "niyeen"--a nearly constant irritation. Perhaps a precise, careful reader could have disguised the fact that Talese's prose is uninspired, his observations uninteresting, his concerns and insights shallow. But perhaps not. W.M. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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